Best Practices of TN-ITS Shared in Recent Meeting

The TN-ITS Joint Progress meeting, held on 27 November in Brussels, gave an opportunity for TN-ITS members to exchange information and share best practices. TN-ITS links the road operators with the mapmakers to provide users with fresh, accurate map data at all times. It is important that digital maps for ITS are highly up to date to ensure road safety and efficiency.

A notable trend in the discussions was the call for a feedback loop, which would facilitate interactions between data providers and data users. Particular interest in this was raised from Sweden and Norway, whereas Flanders mentioned that the feedback loop would be useful in improving data and system quality, as well as helping detect the weak points in the system. Additionally, Finland has a new project Open 3.1.1 standard transparency, which is about roads and data of the road and which will also include a web service to enable the provision of feedback.

The meeting provided insight into some other interesting TN-ITS related activities that member state authorities are currently undertaking.

In Sweden, the Swedish National Road Database (NVDB) is developing a decoder so that it can provide better assistance to its clients. Currently, it is possible only to encode data through the NVDB system. In addition, the NVDB is working to resolve issues related to flexibility, performance, and operational status. Next year should see some improvements being achieved. It was mentioned that in Norway, the Norwegian Public Road Administration (NPRA) is also engineering a decoding functionality.

In Finland, Digiroads is the system that contains all state-owned roads, as well as bus stops. However, it is used exclusively for static road data and not real time and/or dynamic data. There are also no intentions of expanding into this direction. However, there are plans to export more traffic regulations and signs in TN-ITS, as Digiroads receives them from their respective sources.

In the UK, TN-ITS has started in Nottingham and Manchester for now, as other cities have not been able to get Speed Restrictions out of their systems. Data is currently accessible in a manual way, and work needs to be done on achieving an adequate level of data automation. Overall, the exchange of information needs to be more robust. It was suggested that TN-ITS could cooperate with Highways England in order to promote TN-ITS in the UK. This will be a point for the TN-ITS platform to investigate in the future.